North Shore Lineworkers Continue Hurricane Ian Response In Florida

WAKEFIELD, MA — A crew of lineworkers from Wakefield, Reading, Peabody and Danvers were on site in Bartow, Fla. over the weekend and into Monday helping clean up an area hit hard by Hurricane Ian last week.

Crews headed south as part of a regional mutual aid mission early last week initially scheduled to support a municipal power company in Jacksonville, Fla. with any power outage issues they experienced as Ian came ashore.

On Wednesday, the storm blazed through parts of the state, hitting areas around Fort Myers, Fla. with catastrophic storm surge and category four hurricane winds.

See full coverage of Hurricane Ian.

By Sunday, local crews were in Bartow, Fla.

Bartow is more than 80 miles north of Fort Myers and the track of Ian’s core at landfall. Still, the storm downed trees, damaged utility lines and prompted inland flooding from heavy rain, according to reports in the Lakeland Ledger, which covers Bartow and the larger Polk County region.

Roughly 63,000 local energy customers were without power immediately after Ian swept through, according to the Ledger.

Outside of electricity problems, storm damage in Bartow prompted a city-wide boil water advisory last week, according to the New York Times.

The Wakefield Municipal Gas and Light Department shared photos of its crews on Sunday, showing crews working in bucket trucks on utility infrastructure in a residential neighborhood.

Personnel were back at it on Monday, repairing and replacing damaged utilities along Florida’s Route 60 road in Bartow.